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Saturday, January 1, 2011

Top 10 Censored Education Stories of the Decade

Rachel Norton posted the following list of top ed news stories of the decade. While I would agree that these were important education stories, they are all well known to most of the public. Yet each also has a hidden story behind it that has been ignored by the media. I’ve included Norton’s original list (in black). After each of her synopses I’ve added the hidden story behind it (in red).

10. The rise of autism: In 2001, the incidence of autism was thought to be one case for every 160 people, which even then was much higher than in previous decades. Today, the accepted incidence is more like one case for every 100 people. Though the increased incidence is as much a public health issue as an educational one, I’ve included the phenomenon on this list because the increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism has had a profound impact on schools. From an educational perspective, autism is a perfect storm–children with autism have expensive needs, but respond well to intervention. No one really knows how much treatment is appropriate according to the framework set by special education laws.

While it is certainly shocking and significant to parents and educators that autism rates are going up, what has been virtually ignored by the media are the reasons for the increase. Autism rates increase dramatically among older parents. A ten-year increase in maternal age, for example, increases the risk of autism by 38%. Unlike Down syndrome, both older fathers and older mothers have a higher risk. Therefore, one likely reason for the increase in autism is the fact that many parents are waiting longer before having kids.

9. Still waiting for technology to revolutionize education: At the beginning of the decade, most people would have predicted that schools would be using computers and technology in ways that enhanced student achievement and learning. Today, at the end of a decade that has seen an enormous expansion in the use of technology in everyday life, schools are still using computers in much the same way that they were at the start of the decade. More classrooms have computers; more schools have computer labs; but curriculum development has not kept pace with the interconnected, social nature of today’s Internet. Even as students text, access YouTube and update Facebook on their mobile phones, their classroom computers block access to most of those same services. Teaching students to be smart consumers of sometimes unreliable Internet data and careful stewards of their personal information is of paramount importance for the next decade, but it’s not clear that schools are up to the task.

The hidden story here is that schools are spending bucket loads of their dwindling budgets on computers, software and other technology, while they fire teachers, librarians, nurses, custodians and secretaries and eliminate staff development days, and see a continuing achievement gap. Technology, like teacher quality, privatization, tenure and unions, is just another red herring that allows us to overlook the overwhelming cause of low student achievement: poverty. Bring families out of poverty and we’ll see dramatic improvements in student achievement, with or without fancy technology.

However, if we do want to see technology used in creative and clever ways to enhance learning, then teachers need to be provided more professional development opportunities to learn the technology, play with it and create innovative uses for it. This, sadly, is not happening, nor is it likely to happen with declining education budgets. One example of a creative use of technology is a series of experiments I designed for high school students to study the effects of drugs on nematodes using digital microscopy and software from the NIH to track their movements. It is a real world scientific experiment that not only teaches about the nervous system and cells, but has students collecting and analyzing their own original data. However, to develop this curriculum I spent three summers collaborating with scientists at UCSF and had to obtain all my own funding, without any support from my school, district or the state.

8.Curriculum wars continue: A bunch of Intelligent Design believers got elected to the Kansas State Board of Education, and suddenly we’re all debating Darwin again. Then Texas–one of the biggest textbook markets in the country, whose size gives it the power to shape curriculum choices far beyond its borders–decides that American History as traditionally taught is biased. So schoolchildren across the country will now learn, among other things, “about the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” If anything, these skirmishes should remind us all to pay attention to the compositions of our state Boards of Education–they are powerful enough to create quite a kerfuffle if captured by extremists of any stripe.

Like the adage that history is written by the victors, the textbook industry is controlled by the biggest, most powerful publishing houses, each of which has a stake in perpetuating the American Dream mythology and the conflation of capitalism and democracy. Therefore, textbooks, especially history books, will always downplay, manipulate and censor the history of unions and working people, extol the virtues of capitalism, and glorify the histories of the rich and powerful, regardless of who is on the school boards.

7. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilds its schools from scratch: Prior to Katrina, New Orleans’ schools were considered to be among the worst in the nation–64 percent were deemed academically unacceptable by the state of Louisana, and the graduation rate was about 50 percent. The devastation and displacement of thousands of students in the wake of the disaster created an opportunity for reformers and policymakers, who quickly replaced schools that had been destroyed with a new network of charter schools. The district was rechristened the “Recovery School District,” and dollars flowed in, both from the Federal government and private sources. Recent college graduates, eager to make a difference, also came in droves to teach in the “new” New Orleans public schools. Results? Initially, very promising–test scores posted by New Orleans have risen dramatically in the five years since the storm. A decade from now, will New Orleans be one of the nation’s highest-achieving school systems? That kind of sustained improvement will depend on sustained effort and sustained investment.

6. Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone inspire reform movement: Adopting the motto “whatever it takes,” the charismatic and energetic Canada set out to fight poverty and low academic achievement in a 97-square-block zone in Harlem. Private donations and accolades poured in, and Mr. Canada’s ambitious (and breathtakingly expensive) project was chronicled in a well-reviewed book (“Whatever It Takes,” written by journalist Paul Tough). The Zone’s two charter schools initially showed positive results, but more recent studies have illustrated just how hard it is to break the interconnected cycles of poverty and low achievement.

5. Landmark desegregation cases reshape student assignment policies: In 2007, the Supreme Court decided two major school busing cases (Meredith vs. Jefferson County Board of Education and People Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No.1 et. al), striking down any school assignment plan using race as a tie-breaker. The 5-4 decision said student assignment policies could be “race-conscious” but could not take an individual student’s race into account. Many school desegregation advocates fear that the Court’s decision will intensify rapidly resegregating schools and worsen educational inequities between low- and high-income communities.

The hidden stories here are that charter schools are speeding up the re-segregation process, despite these court rulings and that class matters even more than race. The argument for desegregation in Brown vs Board of Education was that separate was inherently unequal; therefore, stop segregating. However, even when schools were desegregated by race, they were still heavily segregated by class, with higher income schools having higher graduation rates and sending more kids to four year universities. Wealthier parents tend to live in wealthier neighborhoods, thus concentrating their wealth in a few schools. When their kids aren’t automatically assigned to the desired school, they are more likely than lower income parents to have the time, connections and understanding of the system to fight for their kids’ placement in their desired schools. When they can’t get into the desired public schools (or when there are no desired public schools) they have the wealth to send their kids to elite private schools.

4. Charter movement reaches a peak: Though the first charter schools opened in the early 1990s, the charter school movement matured in the last decade, with the number of charter schools doubling since 2000 (there are now about 5,000 charter schools open nationwide). Initially, charters were seen as laboratories for promising practices, but they have since been hailed by some reformers as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools (in New Orleans, discussed in #7 above, two-thirds of the Recovery School District’s schools have been reopened as charters). Others, notably education scholar Diane Ravitch, who wrote the 2010 book ”The Death and Life of the American School System,” the charter debate is really a distraction from a serious conversation about how to fix our educational system, which is and will continue to be dominated by traditional public schools. Finally, early claims about the stellar academic progress of students in charter schools (as compared to their counterparts in traditional schools), may have been overblown. Several studies released in 2009 and 2010 found that charters, on average, perform no better than traditional public schools.

3. Mayoral control is tempting, but not a magic bullet: The trend toward big-city mayors assuming control of their city’s school system actually began in the 1990s, when mayors in Boston and then Chicago took over their city’s schools. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over his city’s schools in 2002, followed a few years later by Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. In 2006, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was prevented by a judge’s ruling from assuming more power over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Assuming control of failing school districts is tempting for Mayors, who think that controlling school board and Superintendent appointments is a great way to ensure accountability and stability in school leadership. But does mayoral control actually improve schools? Researchers say there is no compelling evidence of a connection between rising achievement and mayoral control.

2. Race to the Top: With the creation of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan dramatically increased the Federal role in education. Is that a good thing? The four options for states to use to turn around failing schools are not supported by any particular research, and the huge jackpot being dangled by the U.S. Department of Education won’t necessarily go where it’s needed the most — instead, it will go to the states that best parrot Washington’s new party line.

1. No Child Left Behind: I don’t think you can underestimate the impact this law had on schools over the past decade. NCLB was one of President George W. Bush’s signature policy achievements, but it was also backed by powerful Democrats in Congress, including the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California. The law drastically expanded the use of standardized tests and set up the unachievable goal of making all students proficient by 2014. Schools that failed to meet growth targets (Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP) for all students and specific subgroups (like members of minority groups and students with disabilities) were subject to sanctions, which became more severe each passing year. The one good thing the law accomplished was to focus attention on the achievement gap, and put schools on notice that they should pay attention to the achievement of all students. But the law’s sanctions and targets were unnecessarily punitive and unrealistic, and led to a narrower focus on basic skills rather than critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.

NCLB (re-christened as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, its original name) has been up for reauthorization since last year, but little progress has been made (the Obama Administration says reauthorization will be a top priority for 2011). Until that reauthorization happens, all of NCLB technically remains in effect, though it’s unclear whether its most toxic provisions will actually be enforced.

There are two big under-reported stories here. First, NCLB was designed so that its goals could never be attained. Virtually every school in California is expected to be failing by 2014, the year all students are supposed to be proficient under NCLB. The reason is that if any subgroup of students (e.g., special education, immigrant, ESL, low income, etc.) at a school fails to improve sufficiently, the entire school is deemed a failure under NCLB.

While there are certainly huge profits to be made by selling tests, textbooks and curriculum, there may be even greater potential profits ahead for charter school companies and EMOs. After four years of failure, schools must replace all their teachers, implement new curricula, appoint outside experts, or convert to a charter school. With states like California expecting nearly 100% failure by 2014, this could open up a backdoor route for the complete privatization of the k12 education system.

It's really hard to tell how many people oppose NCLB and to what extent. I've never met a teacher who supported it and plenty do speak out. In fact, teachers are notorious complainers. The real problem is that few are willing to act out to oppose it, especially our unions, which have spoken out impotently and then collaborated with the state to implement NCLB, despite their "opposition."

" Technology, like teacher quality, privatization, tenure and unions, is just another red herring that allows us to overlook the overwhelming cause of low student achievement: poverty. Bring families out of poverty and we’ll see dramatic improvements in student achievement, with or without fancy technology."

1. How to do that?2. Is there a correlation between single parenthood and poverty?

There is a correlation between single parenthood and poverty (e.g., two parents working can usually earn more money than one).

To truly bring people up out of poverty will require a social revolution in which the rich are stripped of their power and their wealth is redistributed more equitably. Short of that, there are many reforms that could reduce and limit the wealth gap. For example, taxes for the wealthy have been declining steadily. They currently pay less taxes than they did under Reagan. Increase taxes on the rich and use that to fund social services that benefit lower income people (e.g., housing subsidies, free and universal health care, subsidized education and job training).

Imposing a religious expectation (e.g., two-parent family) is not an expedient solution to the wealth gap. First, we already have such a system. Married couples enjoy all sorts of legal benefits that unmarried couples, gay couples and single parents are denied. This has existed for years, yet the wealth gap has grown. Secondly, there is no incentive for being a single parent, unless it is to avoid being in an abusive relationship with the other parent. Having two (or more) parents makes child rearing much easier, while increasing the odds of having enough income. The only "incentive" I can imaging you're talking about is welfare, which is not an incentive at all, but a scrap to help desperate people not be quite so desperate.

Any solution to the wealth gap must involve limiting the acquisition of wealth by the rich and an increase in wealth by everyone else. This was working slowly in fifties and sixties as a result of progressive taxation and relatively high taxes on the rich, combined with gains by labor through the unions in terms of wage increases and pensions.